Vincent Bridges

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Omen Update: Nostradamus’ Comet

II: 46
Apres grad troche humain plus grad s’appreste,
Le grand motor des siecles renouuelle:
Pluye, sang, laict, famine, fer & peste,
Au ciel veu feu, courant longue estincele.

After a great misery, an even greater approaches,
The great motor of the cycles is renewed:
Raining blood, milk, famine, iron and pestilence,
In the sky will be seen a fire, dragging a trail of sparks.

II: 62
Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes une horrible defaite:
Puis tout a coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete.

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible “undoing” of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One hundred (days) of power, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

VIII: 77
L’antichrist trios bien tost annichiliez,
Vingt & sept and sang durera sa guerre
Les heretiques morts, captifs, exilez,
Sang corps humain eau rogie gresler terre.

The Third Antichrist soon annihilated,
Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last:
The heretics dead, captives exiled,
Blood soaked bodies, and a reddened, icy hail covering the earth.

These three quatrains from the Seer of Provence point to a connection between a comet, the death of a “Mabus” who is the third antichrist, and the 27 year long war with Islam, the Final Crusade of World War III, with its very, very destructive scenarios. While the space shuttle Columbia disaster was indeed a mythic event that could be seen as a comet-like trail of fire and sparks n the sky, it is possible that Nostradamus, in his crafty way, is also directing us to a real comet. This added coincidence, a real comet, a mythic disaster to the faux goddess Columbia, and the impending war and probable sudden death of one of the three Mabus archetypes, leaves one simply gasping for breath at the strength of the insight.

What real comet? Well, chances are, you haven’t heard of C/2002 V1, or Comet NEAT yet, but you will‚Ķ

In the middle of September 2002, around the equinox, a large cometary body, twice the size of Pluto, plunged through the asteroid belt into the inner solar system headed on what could only be called a close encounter trajectory with our sun. It brightened rapidly and on November 6th 2002 was discovered by NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Tracking, or NEAT, program as it emerged from the asteroid belt. Closer examination showed that it was not an asteroid, but a strange nickel/irridum rich snowball of a comet.

It came from the direction of the constellation Pegasus and after swooping around our sun inside the orbit of Mercury would head off again in a long, one and one half a precessional cycle orbit of between 37,000 thousand and 39, 000 years. The last time it visited, modern man had yet to develop from the earlier homonids. A few thousands years later, the Neanderthal was extinct and Homo sapiens sapiens, or monkey too smart for his own good (also known as killer monkey for what they did to the Neanderthal), was the lord and master of the planet. Is it our turn, when, as Nostradamus reminds us, the comet shall pass?

The comet was visible, though not with the naked eye, to those who knew where to look when the space shuttle went down. As the Columbia streaked east into the dawn and her doom, the faintest traces of the glow of the comet could be seen just below Pegasus and just above the juncture of Pisces and Aquarius. Ten days later, it could be seen with the naked eye in the moments just before dawn, a tiny silver star on the horizon.

And then it plunged too close to the sun to be seen, except by NASA’s SOHO solar observatory. As SOHO watched the object’s close encounter with the sun, pulses and flares erupted and on February 18th an enormous coronal mass ejection surged out from the sun and swatted the comet as it passed. And then the fun began‚Ķ

One day after the CME struck the comet, the Homeland Security folks issued a very serious toned warning about preparing for a disaster or a terrorist attack. Included were provisions for “clean air” such as “sealing doors and windows with duct tape and using heavy-duty plastic bags. The person should also try to keep the nose/mouth clear of any dust (you should have a dust/comfort mask handy). Read the steps for ‘clean air’ as advised by the Homeland Security Department.” http://www.ready.gov/clean_air.html

Other items included:

¬©¬£ “Be prepared to improvise and use what you have on hand to make it on your own for at least three days, maybe longer.” http://www.ready.gov/overview1.html

¬©¬£ “Some of the things you can do to prepare for the unexpected, such as assembling a supply kit and developing a family communications plan, are the same for both a natural or man-made emergency. http://www.ready.gov/overview.html

¬©¬£ “You may have trouble getting through, or the phone system may be down altogether, but be patient.” http://www.ready.gov/overview2.html

¬©¬£ “If you see large amounts of debris in the air, or if local authorities say the air is badly contaminated, you may want to “shelter-in-place” http://www.ready.gov/overview2.html

These are rather curious suggestions if your talking about a terrorist attack, even a nuclear one. But they just might make sense if NASA had suddenly decided that a period of cometary debris was about to hit. The Homeland Security folks didn’t get the timeframe correct and set off a panic too early. At the height of that over the top alert panic, a small story appeared concerning a think tank scientist whose study suggested that the government not tell the people of an imminent and unavoidable world-class event was due.

Also we are reminded, as the world hovers between war and cometary cataclysm, of Fulcanelli’s season of the double catastrophe, and even more sharply of “Paul Mevryl’s” comet or asteroid interpretation in K. R. Johnson’s Fulcanelli Phenomenon. There he connects the comet, eerily enough, with the constellation of Pegasus and the idea of a fiery hail falling on the Middle East. And the timing of the prediction is nothing short of astounding for a pre-modern astronomy. Fulcanelli pinpoints the 20 years from 1992 to 2012 as the season of the double catastrophe, with the most likely time being around the fall equinox of 2002. Being off by only a few months on a cometary period of 37,000 years is remarkable by any standard.

And there is also the Egyptian goddess aspect, the return of the goddess Sekhmet, the Eye of Ra…

In the oldest of Egyptian catastrophe myths, the lion headed Goddess Sekhmet is dispatched by Ra to destroy mankind because of their insistence on following Set instead of Ra’s governors, Osiris and his son Horus. She was distracted from her duty, and became instead the goddess of love and healing, Hathor. But the secret catastrophic Sekhmet retained a special place in Egyptian theology. It was thought that she would return to finish her task at some future date, and so should be worshipped and propitiated just in case.

The Egyptians left no clue as to when this could be expected, except that the sky would be the opposite from that of the Zep Tepi, or the first time. Given the period of the comet, close to one and one half a precessional cycle, just a little more than one zodiacal age off, the sky on its return, in terms equinox and solstice alignments to the zodiac and galactic center, will always be exactly opposite each time. In other words, 37,000 thousand years ago, when it last appeared out of Pegasus, the fall equinox was at the cusp of Aquarius/Pisces not the spring, which was in Leo/Virgo, hence the Sekhmetian image of half lion, Leo, and half woman, Virgo, and the tilt was toward galactic center. Now it is reversed: spring equinox in Aquarius/Pisces and fall equinox in Leo/Virgo, with the tilt away from galactic center.

Is the comet, with its nickel/irridum redness and its possible debris storm the destructive “goddess” the Egyptians called Sekhmet? And is she now returning for a second run at cleansing the planet?

Curiously enough, the SOHO photos taken on February 18th of the CME that struck the comet also show a sign, if we can see it. The fiery mass of force surges up from the sun and swirls, as it gets closer to the comet, into a rough but recognizable eye of Ra.

So, sometimes within that hundred-day framework Nostradamus predicted, while the world watches the lock step to war and possibly over the brink to that 27-year war of global destruction, the earth will pass through at least the tail of the comet. It is almost impossible that the comet itself could have been skewed enough to actually hit the earth, but passing through its tail, full of heavy metal meteors that may precipitate as dust, and probably as chunks much larger as well, maybe disaster enough. A double disaster, in fact, just as Fulcanelli predicted, or an omen, a sign from the Goddess, that if we don’t work together, we just might die together, whether we like it or not.

From my best guess based on the information at the websites listed below, we will pass through the tail of the now deflected comet anytime from late April through June. The earlier it starts after the next closest approach to earth around the spring equinox, the more disastrous the consequences. The closer to the summer solstice, the more likely it is that it just be a good light show in the sky with millions of bright red meteors streaking down like hail. If nothing shows up by the summer solstice, we have dodged the bullet once again.

At the very least though, these signs and portents in the sky, these omens, should be a wake up call. If we understand the myth and its metaphor, then we just might be better prepared to face the perilous times and navigate them safely. All we can really do, however, is hope the goddess is lenient and cautionary, rather than vengeful and destructive…

The Night of Sekhmet is coming to a reality near you this spring or early summer… What kind of world would you like to awake to?

Sources for Comet NEAT:

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_02_12/
http://sci.esa.int/content/news/index.cfm?aid=14&cid=37&oid=31434
http://www.free-minds.org/comet_story.htm
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/neat_soho_030218.html
http://www.astrocy.com/kudo.htm
http://cometography.com/lcomets/2002v1.html

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Part VII – The Center of the Labyrinth

By following our thread of Ariadne, the hidden 17 that connects the shuttle Columbia’s fiery death with Nostradamus’ warning of a comet as a harbinger of the world war with Islam to the Illuminati inspired idea of a faux goddess of Freedom called Columbia and on to Crowley’s Book of the Law, we have arrived at long last at the center of the labyrinth. Instead of the Minotaur however, that perennial symbol of overbearing, virgin eating, masculine authority, we find instead the Star Goddess, offering us a choice: extinction or enlightenment, take your pick.

I mentioned the great conspiracy above, In essence, it boils down to this basic dualism: those who would even aid in the extinction of humanity if it served the purposes of their own greed and ego and those who would rather see humanity attain a degree of enlightenment and save itself from what appears to be approaching extinction. Does anyone really believe that even a small nuclear exchange in the Middle East, South-East Asia or the Far East would not bring on a near total collapse of an already fragile planetary ecology? Does anyone really want their children and grandchildren to live through that?

The message of the Star Goddess is very simple. “Invoke me under my stars! Love is the Law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well!”

“Invoke me under my stars!” This is a clear direction to re-establish the sense of wonder and awe at the universe visible in the night sky that led out ancestors to create religion and spirituality in the first place. Let us celebrate the seasons, let us mark the rising and setting of those stars significant in our myths, let us come once again to understand ourselves in terms of the cosmic mill, the great wheel of time that marks the precessional year. As the very elements that make up our bodies and our planet came originally from the fusion factories at the center of stars, The Goddess is nothing less than factual when she announced that every man and every woman is a star. Therefore “Invoke me under my stars,” is an injunction to celebrate the unity of all life, all mind, in the universe.

“Love is the Law, love under will,” is a simple and direct statement of the basic tenet of Mahayana Buddhism, “all life is holy; all minds are capable of enlightenment,” in a new and radical form. However, the concept itself is as old as the original founding of Buddhism in Tibet by Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava, in the 8th century. The mantra for his Guru puja is a Sanskrit phrase, “vajra guru padma sidhhe hum,” which translates, as “The Indestructible Will of the Enlightened Teacher is the Power of Fearless Compassion in Realization.” Another version makes the connection even clearer: “padme dharma vajra citta hum,” or “Fearless Compassion is the Law, the Indestructible will to realize enlightenment.” In the west, this idea has surfaced, as in St. Paul’s “All things are lawful for me, but I will be dominated by nothing,” and St. Augustine’s “Love: and do what thou wilt,” even among the Christians. The idea is that no action, no choice, should ever be undertaken that is not simply and purely an act of Fearless Compassion.

“Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love.” Here the Star Goddess is playing on English’s paucity of words for the concepts related to “love.” There should be no mistake as to what kind of “love” is declared the very essence of the Law or Dharma. Fearless compassion, the deep understand than even a single person’s pain and suffering diminishes everyone else, is the very nature of the “substance of we-feeling,” which, according to Doris Lessing, is the main indicator of sentience in the universe. And there are, as the Goddess reminds us, many things that are called love that fall far short of fearless compassion, many ways in which the wrong use of “love” leads not to we-feeling, but isolation and ignorance. Only fools mistake such things for the Love, which is the Dharma itself.

“There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well!” And this is of course the point of the lesson. Love, in the sense of fearless compassion, is not choosing the dove and casting out the snake, but rejecting the duality itself as presented by the choice. Choosing either is limited and limiting; it does not lead to an increase of the substance of we-feeling, but to an increase in isolation and distance. A third choice is indicated, one that resolves the paradox of the dove and the snake.

It has been almost a century since the Star Goddess spoke, and in that time we have seen all too clearly the results of choosing up sides for a deadly game of doves and serpents. Untold millions died in the most cataclysmic century that humanity has ever known, including all the plagues and barbarian invasions of the past. Now, 57 years after mankind attained the ability to destroy itself and all life on the planet through nuclear annihilation, the possibility of that happening seems more likely than at any time since the bad old days of the standoff with the Rooskies over Cuba.

Crowley at least understood that the advent of the new aeon meant a time of cataclysmic change. “The Secret Chiefs had informed me that a new aeon implied the breaking up of the civilization existing at the time‚Ķ The first act‚Ķ would be to plunge the world into the catastrophe of a huge and ruthless war‚Ķ The Secret Chiefs told me this war was imminent‚Ķ” he informs us in his Confessions. In fact it was just over a decade away as the Star Goddess spoke and its final act was not played out until 1999 and the last Balkan War.

At height of the Great War, phase one of the century of destruction, and 13 years after the Book of the Law, Crowley had an experience of samadhi on the nature of the Star Goddess. This experience was mentioned only once, in the 1922 commentary on the Book of the Law, but clearly formed an important part of Crowley’s understanding of the meaning of the Star Goddess’ message.

He called it the “Star Sponge,” a most curious title, and while meditating on the starry night sky in New Hampshire had the realization that the physical universe is but a representation of the essential structure which lay behind it. “I exclaimed: ‘Nothingness with Twinkles!’ I concentrated upon this vision, with the result that the void space which had been the principal element of it diminished in importance; space appeared to be ablaze, yet the radiant points were not confused, and I thereupon completed my sentence with the exclamation, “But what Twinkles!’ ”

This realization led him to the idea of a quantum inseparability principle in which “every thought possesses a necessary relationship with every other thought,” and all stars are connected to all other stars by rays of light. In a flash, Crowley also saw that the universe was highly organized, with light as the organizing principle, the mind or nervous system as it were, of the universe. Crowley would never be closer to the Star Goddess than he was at that moment.

Crowley relates this vision while discussing verse 59 of the first section of the Book of the Law: “59. My incense is of resinous woods & gums; and there is no blood therein: because of my hair the trees of eternity.” He comments before relating his vision that “it seems possible that Our Lady describes Her hair as the trees of eternity because of the tree-like structure of the cosmos.” At the precise moment that Crowley had his samadhi on the goddess of space, in a hospital back in England, a new mythology of trees and stars and a goddess of space was emerging from the pen of a shell-shocked young infantry officer suffering from a bad case of trench fever, J. R. R. Tolkien.

Lt. Tolkien, a newly married Oxford graduate, had been in the line with his regiment, the 13th Reserve battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers since late 1915, fighting through the Battle of the Somme with its senseless carnage and Morder-esque landscapes. In the fall of 1916, he came down with trench fever and was evacuated back to “Old Blighty” as the Tommies in the trenches called England. Trench fever was a serious illness caused by vermin and related to Lime Disease and typhus. Tolkien did not fully recover until the early 1920s.

But he put his time in hospital to good use, exploring what would be the key to his literary works, that all language had its origins in, and was shaped by, the mythology it was used to express. Tolkien had unknowingly stumbled on the essential truth behind all magickal philosophy: myth evokes language, language invokes myth; one does not survive without the other.

As an example, Tolkien discovered that the words for tree and star were related in Finnish, and he speculated on the myth that could account for the connection. As he created his own language, High Elven, based in part on Finnish, he wove this philological point into the story. In the Silmarillion, the long and complex tale Tolkien wrote during his recovery, Varda, one of the Valar, the gods of Middle Earth, creates the stars from the leftover debris from the destruction of the pair of light emitting Trees at the center of the original paradise that was Arda, or Middle Earth.

The struggle at the heart of the story is over the remaining Light from the Trees, locked eternally into three fantastic jewels called the Silmarils. In the end, only one of the Silmarils remain, and the Valar place it in the sky as the Morning and Evening star, symbol of hope unlooked for and a sign of the Valar’s continuing concern for the Children of Iluvatar.

Some of Tolkien’s earliest poetry concerned these themes and as he wrote the Silmarillion in the winter of 1917, he sketched out the earliest form of what became the Hymn to Elbereth in The Lord of the Rings. The Hymn in its finished version has some fascinating points of congruence with the Star Goddess from the Book of the Law.

Here’s the Hymn in Elvish, followed by my translation:

Ah elbereth gilthoniel
Silivren penna miriel
O menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palandiriel
O galadhremin ennorath
Fanuilos, le linnathon
Nef aear, see nef aeron!

O star queen, star kindler,
White light glitters down like sparkling jewels
From the glorious firmament of the star-host!
Looking out to infinity
From the tree-woven middle earth,
White Brilliance, to thee I will chant
On this side of the ocean, here on this side of the great sea!

Elbereth is the name the Elves use for Varda, meaning simply Star Queen. The Elves are the firstborn, the eldest and immortal Children of Illuvatar and they awoke to life when Orion and Sirius rose in the sky for the first time. They therefore worshiped Elbereth/Varda as the great Goddess of the night sky. The Elves Frodo and Sam met in the Woody End of the Shire also sang of Elbereth: “O Light to us that wander here/ Amid the world of woven trees‚Ķ” And it is Sam, at a moment when all seems lost, who calls out to Elbereth:

“O Star Queen, star kindler,
From the firmament of Infinity
To thee I cry here beneath the death-horror!
O watch over me, White Brilliance!”

The message of the Elven Star Queen was one of hope, and to make this point even clearer, Tolkien makes the Low Elven word for hope, estel, out of the Latin root for star, stella. In what is perhaps the most poignant moment of the entire epic, Sam Gamgee looks up from the depths of Mordor and sees a single bright star through the murk. He thinks of Elbereth, and finds both hope and enough water to continue the quest. In this one symbolic image, Tolkien conveys to us the message of the Star Queen, a light to those who wander here below, and the true evil of Mordor and Sauron. They would blot out the sky and bring on eternal darkness through which no star could shine, a darkness in which no hope can be found.

The pronouncement of the changing Equinox of the Gods and the Book of the Law, with its message from the Star Goddess, was heralded by the celestial phenomenon of the Morning Star shining in daylight as an eclipse darkened the sun itself on the morning of March 17th 1904. It was a sign of hope, and an omen of warning: the first act of the apocalypse was about to begin.

While Crowley may have missed the event in the sky, in what is perhaps the strangest coincidence of all, another Cairo resident did not. Khalil Ibrahim Pasha, a wealthy and successful Coptic lawyer from Assiut, was out that morning surveying his newly acquired property in the Cairo suburb of Ezbet El-Zeitoun. As the sun dimmed that morning, Ibrahim had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She commanded him to build her a church on that spot. It was to take 20 years, and was finished by his son Tawfik Bek Khalil after his father’s death. Built in an unusual Italian style, the Church of the Virgin Mary was a quiet oasis of peace and contemplation for generations of Cairo Copts, until the strange events began in 1968, 64 years after Ibrahim’s vision and the Book of the Law.

A resident of Tumanbay Street in Zeitoun described his recollection of the miracle in a 1968 newspaper interview. “There used to be a big garage for public buses opposite the church, and on 2 April, an hour and a half after sunset, the mechanics and drivers of the garage were alarmed by a disturbance in the street. They ran outside and looked in the direction of the raised faces of the people. A young woman dressed in white had appeared on the church dome. They saw her moving on it and thought that she was about to throw herself off. ‘Be careful, take care, you may fall! Wait!’ they cried, before they realised that the dome was curved and that no human being could walk on it. Then some of the people watching cried out, ‘The Virgin Mary, the Virgin Mary!’ The traffic in Tumanbay Street stopped and the crowd grew bigger and bigger. The whole street was closed and public buses were not allowed to pass through. People would come to Zeitoun and spend the night in the garage opposite the church.”

The apparitions continued for years, recurring sporadically at the Church in Zeitoun and at other places in Egypt, the most recent in 2001 at Assiut, Ibrahim’s birthplace. They were seen by thousands and photographed and in recent years videotaped. From our point of view, the most interesting component of the apparition is that she almost always appears with, or sometimes in the form of, a dove of light. The Star Goddess and the “Christ Bearing Dove” of the Virgin Mary appearing in Egypt are all part of the same archetype.

And it is this same archetype that was both used and misused by the illuminated founders of our country and their symbolic successors at the time of the Civil War. And this same archetype was re-used again by the space program for the first of its reusable spacecraft. By the time of the shuttle Columbia’s synchronistic demise however, the mindset of the mass consciousness was oblivious to the implications, numbed and saddened in a way that did not allow for an expression of the meaning of the event.

Sad as it was, the deaths of seven of the brightest minds on the planet, the psychic impact of the disaster is that of hope, if we can but see it. When the Columbia streaked from darkness into light last Candlemas morning and ignited into a fiery comet of doom and death, it was also a sign of hope and a warning of an approaching apocalypse.
A sign of hope, because if we can read the message and take it into our hearts, then it might be possible to stop the plunge to war. Two weeks after the disaster, between 4 and 10 million people worldwide protested the war on Iraq, and even though President Bush says that the voice of the people don’t account for much in his plans, it is clear that something has shifted, some choice for life, has been made.

But also a warning - If one of the three fools that compose Nostradamus’ Mabus should attack the other and kill one, then the resulting bloodshed and vengeance would be beyond our worst nightmares.

The message of the Star Goddess is not one of despair; no matter how bleak the situation, like Sam in Mordor, we have but to look up at the night sky, while we still can, to find both light and hope.

Let us hope it will be enough,

“O Star Queen, star kindler,
From the firmament of Infinity
To thee I cry here beneath the death-horror!
O watch over me, White Brilliance!”

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Part VI ‚Äì “Tsadi is NOT the Star‚Ķ” The Star Goddess Speaks‚Ķ

The events of the weeks, from the 21st of March to April 7th, leading up to the three-day marathon dictation of the Book of the Law are shrouded in confusion and intentional obscurity. In all of Crowley’s voluminous writings, only these few weeks are skimmed over, as Crowley, the man who could describe a mountain ascendant in graphic detail 40 years after it happened, claimed memory failure and intentionally misleading entries in his diaries. This is so curious as to require an explanation, but Crowley passed it off as a result of his distaste at the content of the Book of the Law, a feeble excuse at best.

So what did happen? Pieced together from all of Crowley’s evasive comments over the years, we can put together a somewhat suppositional chronology. On the afternoon of the 22nd, probably on the terrace at Shepherd’s, Crowley met an Anglo-Egyptian initiate, probably of some Egyptian Sufi order, possibly the sheik with whom Crowley had been studying the Arabic Qabala. He discussed the situation with him and possibly received some advice. Do nothing further tonight, but do a divination on the 23rd and we’ll meet again on the 24th. Crowley apparently followed this advice and did a long complicated Tarot and I Ching reading. Although Crowley recorded this divination, he nowhere published or described its contents.

On the 24th, he again met his Sufi initiate. Crowley’s personal magickal record called him “Idris” or Enoch in Arabic. Beyond this point, silence falls. Sometime in this period, Crowley and Rose visited the Boulak Museum and Rose identified her Horus communicant with the Stele of Anhk-f-n Knonshu, exhibit number 666 in the catalogue. This impressed Crowley even further, and, perhaps through his initiate’s contacts, he had a copy and a translation made. By April 7th, all was in readiness, awaiting only Rose’s signal to begin.

Crowley’s personal diary gives us some clues to what happened in the interval between the 24th and the 7th, but Crowley claimed that he couldn’t remember what they stood for, the entries were in code, or that they were faked as blinds to his real, now forgotten activities. Apparently, although the dates are blotted out, Crowley made at least one more contact with his Sufi friend. Also, on April 6th, we find the curious note: “Go off again to H, taking A’s p.” H could be Helwan or Heliopolis, and given the role “Aiwass” was about to play, the “A” could possibly be him. Crowley was always very cagey about the subject, although he did claim that he was or had been, a living person.

Could the Book of the Law, in however oblique a fashion, have come from Crowley’s encounter with a real illuminated tradition within Islam? Could he have been provided with the insight and techniques required to make contact with the voice of the Aeon? The truth will likely never be known, and Crowley himself seems to have observed in this case a vow of silence more significant than any other in his life.

On April 7th, Rose instructed Crowley to be ready at noon on the next three days to write down what he heard for one hour. He complied, and over the next three days transcribed, from an astral voice that vibrated in his chest when he heard it, one of the most amazing, and beautifully written, pieces of mystical prose in the English language. The talents of Blake or Shakespeare would be hard pressed to top it, and it is much better than Crowley ever did before or after. That alone should give us pause.

The first day, April 8th, Crowley entered his magickal space a little early and sat down with fountain pen and a stack of clean white paper. Precisely at noon, Crowley sensed a form in the corner of the room, Aiwass, who acted as a kind of spiritualist control or MC, introducing the acts as it were. The act that first day was the star goddess Nuit, the second day that of Hadit or Horus the Elder and the third that of Set masquerading as “Ra Hoor Khu(i)t.” Together these three entities sketched out a prophetic pattern and underlying psychic motif for the next 93 years, from 1904 to 1997.

Since this is neither an analysis of the Book of the Law, or a biography of Crowley, we must now narrow our focus to one specific section of the first book and the teachings of the Star Goddess at the end of time.

In verse 57 of the first book we find the following:

“57. Invoke me under my stars! Love is the Law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God.

“All these old letters of my Book are aright; but Tsadi is not the Star. This also is secret: my prophet shall reveal it to the wise.”

There are many resonant points in this verse. Let us note the dove/Columbia synchronicity and its contrast with the serpent. The injunction to choose well can be seen as a warning. Earlier, in verse 52, the prophet is warned that if he doesn’t follow the rules carefully, and in fact makes any kind of choice at all, then he can “expect the dire judgments of Ra Hoor Khuit,” that is the Setian influence and prophecies of the third book. The “ye” used in the verse can also be second person plural, meaning all of us has the choice to make.

What the Star Goddess is saying, giving us fair warning as it were, is that if we don’t remain focussed on Her help and guidance during this time of transition, this change of the Age, then “direful judgements” will follow. However, if we refuse to choose, which is choosing well indeed, and if our rituals, our spiritual practices, are ever unto Her, then it will be possible to regenerate the world. As proof of this, and to give as deep as possible a meaning to the concept, the Star Goddess then revels the secret of the great conspiracy of the last age: “All these old letters of my Book are aright; but Tsadi is not the Star.”

In attributing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the images of the medieval psycho-technology known as the Tarot, we come upon the deeper archetypal forces at work within this great conspiracy. The zodiacal sign Aries is attributed to the Tarot Trump The Emperor, a good choice given the Imperial quality of the Aries current, and its survivors such as the Roman Empire and the Orthodox Church. The sign of Aquarius is attributed to the trump called The Star, the image of a beautiful young woman pouring the Sea of Crystal, the Milky Way, out upon the earth. This image is appropriate, for the most amazing advance of the early Aquarian era is space flight, the urge to reach the stars. The images and the astrological concepts match, but, until the Star Goddess spoke in 1904, the attribution of the Hebrew letters confused the issue.

The fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, HEH, the pictogram, originally, for a window, was assigned to the Emperor and Aries. TSADDI, the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew Alphabet (and pictogram for a fish hook) was equated with The Star and Aquarius. It seems as absurd to speak of opening a window on Imperial Authority as it does to say the Stars fish for souls, hooking them and pulling them out of their environment. Yet, patriarchal violence is killing our planet and our spirits, dehumanizing our functions until we no longer feel the rhythms of the earth tides. And there is something eerily suggestive of the image of “stars fishing” in the tales of UFO abductions.

These attributions seem even more odd when we consider the passage in the Bahir, or “Book of Illumination,” where the transformation of Gimel into Daleth and then into Heh is described. Gimel is the High Priestess in the Tarot and Daleth is the Empress — why then would they transform into the Emperor?

The Bahir also tells us that Tsaddi is composed of the letters Nun and Yod, or Death and the Hermit in the Tarot. To be hooked by the stars is to endure the death of the ego-self might be the simplest way to put it. This certainly describes the old ways of ascetic renunciation, the only path to transcendence in the fallen or “quarantined” condition of humanity. But, in the new age of Horus, these concepts have changed.

If “Tsaddi is not the Star,” then what is attributed to the Star? The obvious attribution for Tsaddi is the Emperor, given the prevalence of Caesar, Kaiser and Tsar as Imperial titles, which means that Heh is assigned to Aquarius. This shift in attributions produces the correct alignment of meanings. In the new alignment, the Emperor’s attributions are Aries (the sign of Imperial structures and patriarchal religions) and Tsaddi, with its element of embracing the spiritual necessity of the death of body and of personality. This gives us a clear archetypal view of the disease of patriarchal violence. The Emperor is the very symbol of the alpha-male dominance and power-over-life thanotropic spiritual illness that caused the “Fall” and got this planet quarantined in the first place; the very illness that is about to drive us into total war over oil dollars and American economic control of the world.

This gives us the image of the Star-Window, which returns The Star to its original meaning of spiritual guidance. The Star-Window is open, and the progression from the Bahir suddenly makes supreme sense: The Priestess becomes the Empress, and then transforms into the Star Goddess. Even the name of God in Hebrew YHVH returns to its original sense. Where once we could read YHVH as Hermit-Emperor-Hierophant-Emperor, all male dominant qualities (suggestive in another sense of the masculine Yod controlling the name, Eve, of the original mother), now the name of God reads, Hermit, Star, Hierophant, Star, or a balance of male and female potencies. The meaning shifts from outer authority of Power-over, which is essentially the ability to destroy, to inner authority, Power-with, the co-creative function of the intuition, which is the ability to change and evolve.

The shift was announced in 1904 and actually began 88 years later in the summer of 1992 and will be complete in 2012, 108 years and nine months after the shift was announced. Some people thought of it as a time shift — from a 12/60 rhythm to a 13/20 rhythm for the Dreamspell pseudo-Mayanists — while others saw it in terms of photon clouds and UFO landings. Every man and every woman (”every man and every woman is a star,” the Goddess announced) on this planet began to come to terms (in whatever way they could) with their and our stellar nature and origins. History has begun to unwind, to unravel back through feuds and antagonisms that are centuries and even millennia old. We have truly come to the last decade of history, and what comes next is up to us. The choices we will make in the next few weeks and months may determine the fate of humanity for the next 13,000 years.

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Part V – Young, English and Rich: Cairo, 1904, on the eve of Armageddon…

We face in the near future not the end of the world, although it could be that as well, but the death of History, the bragging chatter of alpha-male apes huddled around their primary techno-achievement, fire, and the birth of Myth, which is the collective dream of a new kind of “humanity.” Many ancient cultures from around the planet, including some of the most sophisticated, have assigned to this time period the label, “THE END.” The temporal calculations from the Great Pyramid end in 2001, and the Mayan calendar hits reset in 2012, a year that also adds to five, with the helical alignment of the winter solstice sun and the center of the galaxy.

The year 1987, the year of the faux Mayan Harmonic Convergence, was also the last year of the traditional Kalachakra calendar of ancient Tibet, the end of 16 cycles of 60 years since the Kalachakra teachings were released from the mythical kingdom of Shambala in 1027. The Black Hat sect of the Nyngma-pa, or Ancient Ones, teach that the 17th cycle, which began in 1987, will be the last. This cycle will be brief, ending in the emergence of Shambala after a period in which each element will be exalted in every other element. This comes to 25 years, 5 years for each of the five elements, and brings us to 2012…

Curiously, the legend of Shambala gives some meaning to the seemingly nonsensical astrological information in the song, Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In from the hippie musical Hair. The Vishu Purana, one of the oldest of the Hindu classics, mentions Kalki, the Hindu Messiah, an avatar of Vishu who will be the last King of Shambala. Kalki is very similar to Kulkan, the Mayan White Messiah, and he is shown leading a great army of enlightened beings against the barbarians. “He will then re-establish righteousness upon the earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of the age of strife shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal… As it is said ‘When the sun and the moon, and …Tisha, and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion, the golden age shall return.’”

We are living at the end of a great cycle of strife. In 1999 The Great War, the War to End all Wars we thought, finally wound down in the Serbo-Croatian hills where it began 85 years before. The rumble of mortar fire in the streets of Sarajevo and Kosovo were the dying echoes of the thunder from the Western Front of the Great War. The barbarian Communist Chinese vandalize and commit genocide at will in Tibet, the land of the Dharma, as the Precious Guru Padmasambhava foresaw. And that last bastion of freedom and democracy, America, is rapidly slipping into rogue nation status as it pushes its oil dollar hegemony into military action. To awaken, to receive that clarity “pellucid as crystal,” it is clear that we must resolve the problem of power.

Nostradamus said that after a cycle of great disaster, at the moment when the motor of the centuries engages for the next round, a new and even greater cycle of disaster looms ahead. The comet is the sign of the coming moment of truth, our last chance to stop the impending cataclysm of all out war along religious lines. To do that we must understand the message behind the omen in the sky; we must traverse that last arc of the spiral, that last corner in the labyrinth and come face to face with what awaits us at the center…

In 1904, the first “five” year in the 20th century, Edward Alexander “Aleister” Crowley and his new bride, the former Miss Rose Edith Kelley arrived in Cairo on an extended honeymoon. The young Crowley, still shy of 30 and in the midst of a Saturn return, was already an accomplished Alpinist, a celebrated, in some circles at least, minor poet and a veteran of several occult societies. Little did he and Rose suspect, as they checked into the second floor corner room at Shepherd’s Hotel in the heart of downtown Cairo that they were about to make magickal history and inaugurate a 93-year period that would serve as the prologue to the Apocalypse

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To give the reader an idea of how fast the change occurred, in just over a decade, the world would be at war and Shepherd’s would become British Imperial headquarters, a vital link in the chain of command between London and Delhi. The suite of rooms occupied by the Crowleys became part of the offices of the Arab Bureau, a semi-secret group of spies and plotters that included T. E. Lawrence. Out of the Arab Bureau’s manipulation would come in time all the complications found today in the Middle East, including the nation of Israel and the royal families of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the deposed royal family of Iraq. But of course, that’s just another coincidence‚Ķ

For the first month or so, it was great fun. “Eddie,” as Rose insisted on calling Crowley, posed as a Persian nobleman and went in search of Arabic instruction from the masters at Al Ahazr mosque. Rose wandered the markets in Khan il Khalili and visited the chic set who lived on houseboats and in new French-looking mansions over in Giza. They played golf at Helwan, and decorated their new flat in the fashionable European section of Cairo, a few blocks north and east of the Boulak Museum and a short walk from the terrace restaurant at Shepherd’s where Cairo society met for lunch.

Rose and “Eddie” were young Edwardians loose in Cairo for the season after a lengthy honeymoon that had already included a stay in Egypt the previous fall, as well as Paris, Naples, and Ceylon. They were young, English and rich, the world was their playground, and, as Crowley commented, their “marriage was an uninterrupted sexual debauch” until the strange events began in Cairo. But by early March, Rose was three months pregnant and things had changed.

The previous November’s whirlwind tour of Egypt had been wonderful, full of excitement and flash. The best hotels and romantic excursions such as riding the Pullman to Aswan and on by camel to Abu Simbel, where, at the end of the known world, the great Pharaoh still looks down on the barbarians in awe inspiring solemnity. And then, as a special treat, “Eddie” arranged for them to spend the night of November 22nd/23rd in the Great Pyramid. It was terribly romantic, even if a little silly when “Eddie” began to chant and read poems, and Rose was sure to her dying day that this was the moment when she conceived. Two days later, they were on the train to Port Said, bound for India and on to China.

In Bombay, Rose broke it to “Eddie” that she was pregnant. He replied, right-o then, let’s go kill something for a month or two and then if you’re right, it’ll be back to doctors and nurses. And off they went to Ceylon. By mid January, it was obvious she was right, and so they headed back to Cairo. They rented the new flat, and moved out of Shepherd’s, on March 14th and Rose settled in to nest.

But “Eddie,” who had continued his playboy lifestyle, off studying Arabic and playing golf while Rose nested, suddenly decided it was time for a little magickal sex play, ala last November’s memorable evening in the pyramid. On the evening of March 16th, he tried the same invocation and found that Rose was suddenly very upset by the whole thing. She fell into a trance and kept repeating: “They are waiting for you‚Ķ”

This was not the result Crowley was looking for; he wanted her to see the sylphs and was annoyed when she didn’t. The next day, he tried again with similar results. Crowley said later that his intent was to entertain her, showing her the sylphs was like going to the cinema or the music hall. It didn’t work, and on the 17th Rose was even more distressed, insisting that They were waiting, and adding that it was all about the Child, all about Osiris‚Ķ

So just what was it Crowley was invoking that produced this reaction? He calls them sylphs or the elementals of Air, which is technically correct, but they are really the “angelic” beings who inhabit the Air quadrants of the Enochian Tablets, which is actually something quite different. To evoke them, one must use various calls or keys in the Enochian language, received from “angelic” beings by Dr John Dee in the 16th century. These calls have profoundly apocalyptic language and context and their use in such a way, and at such a time and in such a place, is in fact a request to “higher intelligence” to supply information on that apocalypse. And this, seemingly, is just what the “angels” proceeded to do‚Ķ

This is an important point to keep in mind, and it helps make sense of what happened later. On the night of November 22nd/23rd 1903, Crowley vibrated Enochian in the King’s Chamber, producing amazing results. The chamber was filled with an odd violet blue light that grew bright enough for Crowley to read the invocations without the aid of an electric torch. And Rose conceived a child‚Ķ “It’s all about the Child‚Ķ” Rose responded to the invocations in March.

Perhaps it was for Rose, but Crowley wanted to know what was going on. He invoked Thoth, and received a more coherent response. Rose announced that it was Horus who was waiting, that Crowley had offended him and he should be invoked in a new way as the sun. While Crowley protested that he found this absurd, in truth Rose had struck a nerve. Crowley had offended Horus.

Not only had Crowley never invoked him, but also just four years before, Crowley had been involved in the messy break-up of one of Victorian England’s most influential occult societies, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley had at first sided with S. L. “McGregor” Mathers in the dispute, but they soon had a falling out and were on the verge of all out psychic warfare by 1904. Mathers identified with Horus, the Horus the Elder of Upper Egypt, the war god who slew the serpent of chaos. To be in conflict with Mathers was indeed an offence to Horus.

But to Crowley the psychic and psychological ramifications went even deeper. Young Alex, as his family called him, had had a troubled relationship with his father and had never gotten over his father’s death just when he was just hitting adolescence and needed a father figure most. Mathers, in his own quirky way, had filled that missing father role for the young Crowley. Now, as happens to most fathers and sons, it was time for Crowley to rebel and find his own way. On the verge of becoming a father himself, and perhaps denying it subconsciously, this reference to the complex emotions around Horus was guaranteed to grab Crowley’s attention.

Crowley took Rose’s advice seriously and on March 20th attained spectacular results after a disappointing first try on the 19th. This ritual was outlined by Rose and filled in by Crowley following her suggestions. It was indeed a new way, as it was quite emotional in tone, much closer to the devotional style of bhakti yoga than the crisp and commanding postures of ceremonial magick. In it can be found in embryo most of the motifs and metaphors that would blossom forth in a few weeks as the Book of the Law.

Perhaps Rose, with her shrewd womanly intuition and keen emotional intelligence, simply devised a powerful and effective way to keep her dear “Eddie” at home and focused on her and at the same time exorcise some of his own internal fears and guilt about fatherhood. Or perhaps the invocations in the Great Pyramid had made contact with some sort of “higher intelligence” who did indeed have a message for anyone who would, or could, listen.

At any rate, the ritual brought amazing results. Here’s how Crowley summed it up in his small diary, The Book of Results: “20: Revealed that the Equinox of the Gods is come, Horus taking the throne of the east and all rituals, etc. being abrogated. 20: (contd.) Great Success in midnight invocation. I am to formulate a new link of an order with the Solar Force.” In another diary, he recorded: “Hoori (Horus) now Hpnt (Hierophant), ” another reference to the changing of the officers of the Golden Dawn on each equinox. Now, Horus is the Hierophant of the Age, not just the season

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Crowley wrote these notes in the early morning hours of the vernal equinox, March 21st, 1904. Clearly his reference to the Equinox of the Gods referred to both the events of that equinox, and the larger Great Year of precession. His successful invocation of Horus had inspired in him a new understanding of the coming precessional shift in the zodiacal age. Just as Pisces had been the age of Jesus/Osiris, the Dying God, the new age was to be one of the Crowned and Conquering Child, the New Horus.

One other curiosity must be noted. On the morning of March 17th, 1904, Cairo experienced a beautiful annular eclipse of the sun. As the sun rose that morning the eclipse was already in progress. Venus, the morning star in Aquarius, faded briefly and then reappeared as the eclipse strengthened. The effect was that of a beautiful ring of fire, bulging slightly toward the silvery glow of a morning star that refused to fade. This strange portent in the dawn sky was discussed in the local papers, including the Cairo edition of the London Times, on March 18th and 19th. Crowley could not have missed the news articles even if he had missed the event itself.

And so, by the 21st of March, Crowley was hooked. He had smacked the Tar Baby and was on his way to the briar patch. For the next 43 years, the rest of his life, Crowley lived in the shadow of what happened in those next few weeks. He followed the will-o-wisps whispers of the illuminati elves down a long twisted path toward a kind of reverse sainthood, in which his most perverse jokes would become religious movements and his most profound philosophical musing would become fuel for the rantings of disaffected and overindulgent punks the world over.

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Part Four - 23 Skidoo and Kick out the JAMs: The Illuminati Elves at work and play…

I first heard about the illuminati elves in the pages of Dr. John Lilly’s Center of the Cyclone, page 231 in fact. Lilly has the entertaining idea that the various contacts with higher, or just different, intelligences found in religion and occultism can be explained as contact with time travellers from the distant future who work as agents of what Lilly calls Cosmic Coincidence Control Center. These agents, “the elves,” create a network of synchronicity that acts as a thermostatic regulator on human consciousness and its evolution.

Here’s how Lilly puts it on page 231: “Such a network exists and functions‚Ķ throughout this planet. I suspect it extends farther than our earth, but this has yet to be publicly demonstrated unequivocally beyond the private experience of myself and others.” Indeed, coming from the man the New York Times described as “a walking one-man syllabus of Western civilization” we might consider his comments as authoritative.

And the “elves” seem to have been at work on Lilly’s book as well, hence that page 231 synchronicity. This number of course can be turned into a date, January 23rd. Which is another 23, and a pointer toward Columbia’s, both as a faux goddess and as a space shuttle, moment of maximum danger. So what is so special about the number 23?
First off, it seems to be an intuitive trigger of some sort related directly to our DNA. We receive 23 chromosomes from each parent to create the embryo of what we will become, and within our DNA itself, there is an unexplained bonding irregularity, a sort of stutter in the code, every 23rd angstrom in a DNA chain. This is not news to the Kabbalist, who has already figured out that 23 is the numerical value of such Hebrew words as “parting, removal, separation,” “joy,” “a thread,” and “life,” all of which point to sexuality and DNA.

There is also that arcane piece of argot from the turn of the century - 19th to 20th that is - “23 skidoo” the origins of which are shrouded in mystery. Aleister Crowley, a supposed illuminati himself, entitled the 23rd chapter of his classic Book of Lies “23 skidoo” and revealed that the secret was “get out.” This has led some wags to speculate that the final secret of the Illuminati is that you don’t realize you are in until it is too late to GET OUT. 23 skidoo‚Ķ

There are 23 axioms in Euclid’s geometry, and 23 percent of the universe is “dark matter.” In telegrapher’s code, 23 means “break the line,” while in the I Ching hexagram 23 is called Breaking Apart. I could go on and on, once you start looking for 23s you begin to find them everywhere. One of the best books in which to look for 23 synchronicities is Arthur Koestler’s Challenge of Chance. Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a symbol for what some physicists have called QUIP, or the quantum inseparability principle, a theory that holds that every particle affects every other particle in the universe.

And what of January 23rd? The calendar of the Catholic Church informs us that January 23rd is the wedding night of Mary and Joseph, a supposedly uneventful evening according to doctrine. But what if it wasn’t so uneventful? Nine months later would give us a birth date for Jesus of October 23rd coincidentally the date Columbia was unveiled for the public in 1862. This birth date also fits in well with the story of the Magi found in Mathew’s Gospel. It would certainly have taken them several months to travel from the Turkish highlands of central Asia to Palestine in time for the January 6th Epiphany.

To the early Church, the Feast of the Epiphany, which marked the arrival of the Magi, the marriage at Cana and the baptism of Jesus by John, and the appearance of another “dove,” was much more important than Jesus’ nativity. For some sections of the Christian community, such as the Cathars, the Epiphany was the most significant moment in the church calendar. Some obscure secret seemed to hide behind the juxtaposition of these three events, a secret that threatened to change the very concept of Christianity as taught by the official church.

There is no Biblical basis for a nativity feast and what Gospel evidence there is suggests Jesus was born in the late fall, as noted above. The early church had no traditions or celebrations of the nativity until the 3rd century, it didn’t become common until the 4th century and it wasn’t until the 5th century that it officially became December 25th, which was chosen for reasons of religious politics not any sense of spiritual or historical correctness. The act of saying a mass in honour of Jesus’ birth, hence Christ’s mass or Christmas, on the birthday of his most powerful pagan rival, Mithra, is plainly and simply an attempt to absorb and redirect the rival cult’s followers, in effect saying that Christ is more powerful than Mithra because he supersedes him. It also undercuts the importance of the Epiphany, including the Magi as an afterthought to the nativity instead of as the central focus of the story.

The calendar adjustment in the 18th century also helped confuse matters. Adding 11 days meant that Christmas was now January 5th and 12th Night, or the Feast of the Epiphany was now January 17th (and coincidentally, the date the Declaration of Independence was submitted for ratification by the Continental Congress). Most organizations within the church ignored the shift and celebrated the festivals on the same old days, but there were some who found this juxtaposition of the Epiphany and the traditional Feast of St Anthony, the saint already associated with January 17th very appealing. One of those groups was the Catharist neo-Templars of Johann Augustus Starck, Weishaupt’s initiator into the mysteries.

This has led in modern times to another group of Merry Pranksters, the so-called Priory of Sion, seizing upon this and various medieval mysteries such as the treasure of Gisors and Rennes-le-Chateau to make public the very secret connections most prized and carefully hidden by Starck’s Catharist Neo-Templars. A cottage industry has grown up around these matters, without anyone realizing its illuminationist sources. Key events in this mythos that happened on January 17th include the Satanist takeover of the Catholic Church in 1377, King Rene’s birthday in 1408 and Flamel’s successful transmutation in 1387, as well as various events in and around Rennes-le-Chateau.

Note that January 17th, the feast of St. Anthony and the New Style date of the Epiphany, is only five nights away from January 22nd/23rd, the eve of Joseph and Mary’s wedding night. In this one coincidence, we find a cluster of very revealing synchronistic clues. There is a sexual component in both the marriage at Cana and the Holy Couple’s wedding night, as well as John the Baptist’s acknowledgement of Jesus as his son during the Baptism. The visit of the Magi is a symbol of the larger spiritual current and a nod to the original illuminated ones. And tying it all together is the number five, which, as the union of the first masculine number, 2, and the first feminine number, 3, represents growth and sexuality in all its forms. In Tantric practices, 23 is the number of days in the male hormonal cycle, which is of course five less than the feminine cycle of 28 days.

That gives us an illuminated goddess of freedom purposefully tied into a complex of number synchronicities that suggests the true secret of illumination is somehow sexual, and both the secret and the illumination behind it are connected to an alternative view of Christianity. Columbia was first unveiled on 10/23/1862, which as I noted above is 10 + 23 = 33 and 1+8+6+2 = 17. Added together again they are 17 + 33 = 50; also 3 + 3 = 6 and 1 + 7 = 8, 8 + 6 = 14, and 1 + 4 =5. If we take the 23 from the date, then 10 goes into 50 five times. This gives us both our link to the masons, 33, and also 5, 17 and 23, our master numbers of the illuminati elves. The installation date, 12/2/1863 also yields the key numbers, 12 + 2 = 14, 1 + 8 + 6 + 3 = 18 and 1 + 8 = 9. Added together again, 14 + 9 = 23. (Also, 12 + 2 +1863 = 1877, which added together is also 23/5. The same can be done for 10/23/1862; 33 + 1862 = 1895, which adds across to 23/5.) Note that while both dates have prominent 5/23 connections, only the unveiling date has the hidden 17.

Before we get to that hidden 17, the starting point of this labyrinth of synchronicity, I must, in the interest of full disclosure, admit that since my birthday is 5/23/1952, I am sort of the Illuminati poster child in terms of the key numbers. I was informed of this at a pagan gathering several decades ago by a beautiful red-headed witch who took one look at the numerology of my birth date and wanted to know: Who I was kidding? First I say my name is Vincent Bridges, an obvious put-on, and then I give her a birthday that reeks of the illuminati; what am I, some kind of wise guy?

I explained that it was indeed both my real name and my real birthday, and she explained to me about the secret of 23, the five ages of Illuminated history and how everyone born in 1952 (1 + 9 + 5 + 2 = 17) had the hidden 17 that was the mark of the Discordians, a bunch of jokers who were apparently in a kind of time war with the forces of the Illuminati. If I wasn’t kidding her, then anytime anyone who was in the know heard my name and my birthday they would know that I was the one who would conquer the bridges between all the different factions of the Illuminati. Later, back at her tent, she asked if I was the reincarnation of Adam Weishaupt. To really mess with her mind, I replied: No, I’m the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley‚Ķ 23 skidoo‚Ķ

But to return to the hidden 17‚Ķ Remember that Nostradamus spaced his two comet quatrains, II/46 and II/62, 17 quatrains apart, inclusive. And the one moment in the flight of the Columbia that could be completely planned, assuming the launch went off on time, was the moment of orbital insertion, just after midnight GMT on January 17th, 2003. The astrology of this moment matches, with eerie exactness and prophetic consequences, the moment of Columbia’s ceremonial installation on the Capitol Dome in 1863. Coincidence? Perhaps not‚Ķ

When we take 1/17/2003 apart in the same manner as the other dates we find something truly curious. Not only is the year directly a 23, less the 0s in 2003, but 2 + 3 = 5, and 1 + 17 = 18, 5 + 18 = 23, or 2 + 3 = 5. Only years that add to five can change, or bridge, the 17 into a 23, such as 1904, 1 + 9 + 4 = 14 = 5. Also 1913, 1922, 1931, and 1940 add to five, as do 1967 and 1976, 1958 and 1985, and 1949 and 1994 as 23s, which then also reduces to a five. On each of these eleven years, January 17th transforms into a 23/5. Other years that add up to 17 are 1907, 1916, 1925, 1934, 1943, 1952, 1961, 1970, and on these eight years January 17th transforms into 17, or an eight as the sum of 1 + 7, the next number in the Fibbonacci series of 2, 3, 5, 8 which generates approximations of phi, the golden ratio.

In the Tarot, Trump number 17 is The Star, traditionally attributed to the Hebrew Letter Tsadi and the zodical symbol Aquarius, which makes it very appropriate for a goddess like Columbia, who after all has such a significant ascendant in Aquarius, and the space shuttle Columbia, dying as a flaming star in the month of Aquarius. Therefore, it is easy to see Nostradamus’ hidden 17 as a clear indicator of the Star, the comet of the shuttle Columbia, the star in the morning sky that heralds the coming Final Crusade with the Islamic world.

However, to understand that most closely guarded secret of the Justified Ancients of Mammu, the JAMs behind the Illuminati, we must turn to that quintessentially Victorian bad boy, Aleister Crowley. Get ready to kick out the JAMs before we all 23 skidoo…

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Part Three - Weishaupt’s Illuminated Goddess

We have progressed from the prophecies of Nostradamus to the astrology of a synthomorphic goddess’ birth, awakening and death, and yet we have taken only the first few halting steps into the labyrinth of synchronicity and strangeness surrounding the space shuttle disaster. Sensing greater wonders still to be found in the grisly deaths of seven of the planet’s brightest minds, let us arm ourselves with the irrational and plunge ahead toward the beast at the epicenter of the maze.

Mr. Prellwitz’ account of his encounter with the goddess Columbia concludes with a climactic confrontation between the goddess and President Weishaupt in which Weishaupt is freed from alien lizard-like beings who are controlling him. In this one metaphor, we glimpse the true genius of Prellwitz’ vision. In the realm of the collective unconscious, any symbolism with juice is fair game.

The introduction of Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, takes us around another corner of the maze, and strange as it may seem, we can now begin to sense a larger pattern. Suddenly, the bare facts of history, the esotericism of the founding fathers, the creation of a faux goddess identified with the new republic, the care lavished on the installation of the statue on the Capitol Dome, and the number synchronicities concerning the space shuttle Columbia’s last flight, loose their solidity and became vague wisps of mysterioso steam marking the passage of the illuminati elves as they arrange and re-arrange reality for their amusement, and our amazement.

And so, ever vigilant for the whisper of the elves and the sharp burnt metal tang of mystery on the breeze, let us go even deeper into the labyrinth…

Perhaps the most curious part of the creation of the goddess Columbia is the immediate and passionate association of the archetype with George Washington. Phyllis Wheatley wrote her poem while Washington was still a simple member of the Continental Congress from Virginia. Washington however was a Master Mason of the Alexandria 22 lodge, chartered as a Scottish Rite, Royal Arch Temple in the tradition of the French lodges founded by the Chevalier Ramsey. This branch can only be called “illuminationist,” that is expressing a connection to or sympathy with Rosicrucian or Illuminati philosophy. Its practices and initiations, spiritually, would be more along the lines of what today would be called ceremonial magick. Washington would have felt right at home in a Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Temple circa 1900.

This Illuminationist connection brings us to the aforementioned Adam Weishaupt and the Bavarian Illuminati. Weishaupt, a professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt and a former Jesuit, had an illumination over the night of February 1st/2nd 1776. This flash of insight led to the founding, on the 1st of May 1776, of the Order of the Illuminati, a secret society within the secret society of Masonic Orders. By 1785, when they were banned by the government of Bavaria for plotting the overthrow of all the crowned heads of Europe, starting with the Hapsburgs, they had infiltrated Masonic groups in a dozen countries, including France, Britain and the fledgling United States of America. No one knows precisely what happened to either Weishaupt or the Illuminati after that.

This of course is a very good thing for the conspiracy theorists. More outright nonsense has been written about the Illuminati than any other such secret society. Which is a shame, because its real history is quite extraordinary enough. An unbiased look at the documents we do have from Weishaupt and his fellow travellers reveals something quite different from what most of the Illuminuts have been prattling about.

From Weishaupt’s early writings, we find an amazing awareness of the pagan mysteries, particularly those of Eleusius and the Kabiroi of Argos and Samothrace, as well as familiarity with the theories of Pythagoras. We even have a draft for a secret society based on those pagan mystery schools done by Weishaupt while a student at Ingoldstadt. After graduating and a brief stint in the College of Jesus, Weishaupt found his way in 1774 to a neo-Templar Masonic Lodge in Hanover. While not overly impressed by the quality of the vibe at the local lodge, its superiors soon passed Brother Adam on to the Head of the Order, one Johann Augustus Starck.

Starck was a key figure in the neo-Templar revival of the mid 18th century. His patrons included such royal figures as Gustav III of Sweden and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Under his influence, Frederick of Prussia founded several occult societies in the late 1760s. One of them, The Knights of Light, practiced magick and alchemy, and used the grade name Illuminati for an adept. Around the time Phyllis Wheatley addressed her poem to George Washington, Weishaupt met Starck and was initiated into his peculiar blend of neo-Templar illuminism.

Peculiar because Starck claimed to have met, and been initiated and instructed by, a group of Catharist Templars surviving in southern France. From them Starck learned that the original Templars inherited their occult wisdom from an secret society of Essenes in Jerusalem who were in fact identical with the Cathars of southern France. Starck’s Cathars however were a pagan goddess-worshiping cult, who hated the Roman Church because it stole the true identity of Christ, held by them to be St. John. It was this magickal blend into which Weishaupt was plunged by his initiation, and to his credit, he seems to have risen to the occasion.

His illumination on the night of 1st/2nd February 1776, the ancient pagan feast of Imbolc, is our first clue. To clinch it, Weishaupt founded his order, called originally the Order of the Perfectibilists as nod to his Catharist sources, on the 1st of May, Beltane in the pagan calendar. And to make the point even more obvious, the holiest day of all in the Illuminati order is The Feast of St. John on June 23rd/24th, mid-summer night’s eve in the northern latitudes and marking another pagan feast, that of the summer solstice.

Curiously enough, due to the calendar change in the mid 18th century that added 11 days, what in the Old Style was June 24th is now in the New Style July 4th. Since the Declaration of Independence was not signed or ratified or anything else but approved as a draft on July 4th, we might wonder at how it became Independence Day. The more likely choices include August 2nd, when the signings began, or July 2nd when Independence was actually voted upon, or even January 17th when the document was presented, completed and signed, for ratification by the Congress.

This has led some conspiracy theorists to call July 4th Illuminati Day, and some have even gone so far as to claim that Weishaupt immigrated to America and whacked Washington while he was working out back of Mt. Vernon on his private hemp patch and took his place, resulting in Weishaupt as our first president. Needless to say this is one of the more imaginative fantasies generated around the Illuminated, but it does, in a mythic sense, have the ring of truth.

July 23rd/24th 1776 was the first official meeting of the original five members of the Order of the Illuminati. On the New Style date of July 4th, 1776, the Continental Congress approved the draft of a resolution on Independence written by a committee of five, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman and Robert B. Livingston. All five were Masons, and three, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams, had deep overt and covert connections with the illuminist underground of the day. To complete the synchronicities, the completed and signed Declaration of Independence was submitted to the Congress for ratification on January 17th, 1777, and two of the five, Jefferson and Adams, died on the same day, July 4th, exactly 50 years later.

Washington was also thoroughly familiar with, and probably quite sympathetic to, the basic concepts of Illuminism as preached in the Masonic Lodges of the day. Alexandria 22, Washington’s home lodge, was affiliated with several German Illuminist lodges, including the neo-Templars of Johann Starck. It’s French connections led through Lafayette and the Comte de Mirabeau, both prominent Illuminists, back to the Templarisms of the Scottish Chevalier Ramsey. Although we can’t say for sure - the records are incomplete - Washington’s election to Master Mason status in Alexandria 22 may have reflected this new Illuminist shift of focus.

But even more than Washington, it is Thomas Jefferson, the main voice behind the Declaration of Independence, who connects Illuminism, and pagan goddess worship, with the beginning steps toward the creation of the goddess Columbia. The Federalists prior to the election of 1800 quite correctly branded Jefferson an Illuminati sympathizer, if not stooge. Their evidence was flimsy, and probably meaningless in any case as the anti-Illuminati forces did not completely understand the Illuminist agenda, but Jefferson, along with Franklin and Washington, did indeed have such connections and inclinations.

Jefferson was also friendly with Phillip Freneau, who popularised the idea of Columbia as the Goddess of Freedom in the 1780s and 1790s. And Jefferson was instrumental in having the US Capitol building designed as the Roman Parthenon, complete of course with a goddess on the dome. The goddess Minerva, in a form very close to that of Columbia, appears on the seal of the University of Virginia, designed by Jefferson. The Great Hall of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, which houses Jefferson’s books, is a miniature shrine to the goddess.

If there is one piece of art in all of Washington that sums up the basic illuminist idea behind the goddess Columbia and her role in America, it is in the top of the dome of the U.S. Capitol; a fresco entitled “The Apotheosis of George Washington,” painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865 soon after the dome was completed. The central grouping in the highest part of the dome depicts Washington being taken up to heaven, done by Italian artist Brumidi in a style strongly reminiscent of paintings of the Assumptions of Jesus or Mary Brumidi had previously painted in the Vatican. In this case, it is not angels of God who accompany Washington in his assumption, but the female figures of Liberty and Victory. Surrounding these three figures are 13 female figures representing the original 13 states. Around the edge of the dome are painted 6 groups of figures representing war, commerce, marine, agriculture, science, and mechanics. Included in these groups of figures are the gods Mercury, Neptune, Ceres, Minerva, and Vulcan.

Aside from the obvious paganisms, there are two fascinating illuminati clues here. The first is Victory, the Samothracian mother goddess of the Kabiroi, who often shows up alongside Columbia. Weishaupt and Starck thought her to be the original Mother Goddess on which all the pagan mysteries were based. The second is that numerical arrangement of figures. If we take the six figures of the outer rim and multiply by the 13 figures on the second rim, we get 78. Among the papers seized by the Bavarian government in 1785 was an alphabetic code based on three times 26, or 78. This is also the number of cards in a Tarot deck, leading this type of code to be called the Tarot Cipher.

This is not to say that the United States of America is an illuminati plot, and by no means am I saying that the Illuminati control any part of the US government. But it is a fact that the Founding Fathers had such inclinations and that somehow those aspirations were transmitted through the years into many of official Washington’s finest works of public art. Call it an accidental conspiracy if you like, a synchronicity born of similar inclinations and understandings concerning the meaning of “America” as the New World for the New Age.

Weishaupt’s view of a perfect society is very similar in many respects to Adams, Jefferson and Washington’s view of America. Weishaupt foresaw a utopian world state where property, authority and nationalism had been abolished. In this pre-Eden natural state, mankind would join in the brotherhood of man, based on free love, peace, spiritual wisdom and equality of classes and sexes. At the spiritual center of this society was the great goddess of Freedom and Reason. One of Weishaupt’s French followers, the Comte de Mirabeau, would preside during the revolution in Paris over the enthronement of a new Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame de Paris, newly renamed the Temple of Reason.

And so, Weishaupt’s ideas and influence seems to have had a profound effect on the creation of the goddess Columbia, and the general iconography of the archetype of America. In the immediate post-revolutionary era, this is not surprising given the many and well-documented connections and sympathies between the Founding Fathers and the illuminist underground. What is surprising is that these ideas and practices continued intact through the 19th century. Crawford’s original design for the Capitol had Columbia wearing a Phyrigian cap, the symbol of illuminated status conferred in the adeptus major grade of both Starck’s neo-Templars and Weishaupt’s Perfectibilists. And someone worked out very carefully the astrology of the monument’s installation on the Capitol Dome back in 1863.

Wouldn’t that same person, or group of initiates, have also worked out the future astrology of Columbia? Did they see the moment of awakening on the fall equinox of 2002? And even more important, did they see the moment of danger on January 23rd 2003?

Perhaps they did, because there is one curious clue that takes us directly into the number synchronicities of the illuminati elves themselves. The statue of Columbia was first displayed to the public on the Capitol grounds on October 23, 1862. Added together, 10 + 23 = 33, and 1 + 8 + 6 + 2 = 17. Now, 17 is a very curious number, as we will get to in a moment. But first, the mystery of 23 “skidoo.”

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Part Two

The unique creation, strange life and sudden death of the goddess Columbia

Almost from the moment the New World was discovered, it was seen in mythological terms as an exotic goddess, an Indian Queen dressed in feathers and furs ridding an exotic beast like an armadillo and armed with a tomahawk. She summed up the desires of the 16th and 17th century European conquerors for adventure and strangeness, and of course, freedom and eroticism unavailable at home. The wealth and power created by the conquest of this New World Goddess would first enrich the Old World and then turn it upside down, generating a series of world conflicts, beginning in the mid 18th century, that continues in the confrontations of today.

The Catholic south adapted the idea of the Goddess of the New World into the ever-expanding hagiology of the Catholic Church. The Virgin of Guadalupe allowed the archetype to become personal, a connection to the land and its ancestors, while joining a larger universalist vision inside the Church. In the largely Protestant north, things went quite differently.

The 17th century’s Indian Goddess became a tamer Indian Princess, modelled on the archetypal story of Pocahontas. This version, while remaining exotic, was accessible and nubile, open to the embraces of the conqueror. As the 18th century passed, and America grew more developed and its people more educated, the Indian princess gained a touch of Greek elegance. “By the late 1790s,” folk-art historian Nancy Jo Fox comments, “it was not clear whether a feathered Indian Princess had changed into a Greek goddess or whether a Greek goddess had placed feathers or plumes in her hair.”

This transformation coincided with the revolution in America. As a new kind of society in the New World struggled for its life against the power of the Old World, a new archetypal goddess figure emerged in the American collective unconscious. This transformation was guided and shaped by the esoteric awareness shared by the core group of the Founding Fathers. The occult history of the American Revolution has yet to be written, but there was indeed a preponderance of “Masons” involved on both sides of the conflict. Washington, Lafayette and Cornwallis for instance all belonged to the same regimental Masonic lodge.

These esoterically minded Founding Fathers saw “America” as a kind of magical future for the human race, when the archetypes that had in the past been mediated by King and Church would be democratically available to all citizens. This would in fact create, if successful, a kind of psychic protection against “tyranny.” No king or demagogue could grab the symbolic current of a freely archetypal democracy and make it subservient to his will. Or so they thought‚Ķ

The archetype of a new goddess of liberty first emerged in relation to George Washington. In 1775, Phyllis Wheatley, a slave in New England, wrote a poem praising George Washington as a true son of the goddess of Freedom. In the early years of the revolution, this Lady Liberty meshed with the Indian Princess and the Greek goddess Athena, patron of the classical models of democracy such as the city-state of Athens to become, in the poetry of Phillip Freneau, the synthomorphic goddess Columbia.

Even the name suggests a shape shifting, gender morphing, blend of classical erudition and Green Language pun play. We start with a feminisation of Christopher Columbus, the “Christ bearing dove” in Latin, which emphasises the “dove” aspect of the name of the so-called discoverer of the New World. Doves in the ancient world had complex symbolic associations conveying layers of meaning lost in the common Christian symbols of the white dove of peace or innocence, or as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. All the great goddesses of antiquity, Aphrodite, Astarte, Ishtar, Cybele, Isis, Esther, Mari, and, in Christian times, Mary, had doves associated with them. In Mary’s case, her encounter with the dove had all the sexual implications associated with the former “dove” goddess, Aphrodite. Therefore, the “Christ bearing dove” is actually Mary herself, and hence, esoterically, Columbia.

This new image of the goddess Liberty struck a responsive chord in the collective unconsciousness, both in America and in Europe. France would eventually reply with her own version of the new goddess, monumentally mounted in New York Harbour as the Statue of Liberty, with smaller versions in Manhattan and Paris. This Liberty has a torch, a stone tablet and a halo of sun spikes echoing the Apollonian Colossus of Rhodes that inspired it. It is a very classical Liberty, with few attributes specific to the New World.

But the American view of Lady Freedom, the new goddess Columbia, retained a more deliberate kind of synthetic form. The ideas that animated Columbia can be seen in her attributes, that is the objects or symbols that are displayed with her. She is most often shown with an eagle, broken chains and pottery, a cornucopia, images of George Washington, a laurel wreath, a liberty pole and cap, a liberty tree, an olive branch, a rattlesnake, a shield and a stone tablet. The statue of Columbia that used to stand behind the speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives is a fine example. In this one we see the Eagle, and on the other side a snake coiled around a Greek column.

By the 1850s, the archetype of Lady Freedom, the synthetic goddess Columbia, had come to represent America itself. As the designs were finalized for the new dome of the Capitol Building, the new temple of democracy, the architect, Thomas U. Walker, included a monumental statue of the goddess Columbia to cap the dome. Thomas Crawford, a classically trained American sculptor living in Italy, submitted a design for “Freedom triumphant in War and Peace” which, after modification by then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, was accepted. Crawford’s original design included a Phyrgian cap worn by freed Roman slaves, and the very idea of freed slaves was hard for Davis to swallow. Crawford changed it to a Roman helmet, crested with eagle feathers, thereby retaining some of the original native flavour of the Indian Goddess.

A full size plaster model was finished just before Crawford died in 1857. The model’s subsequent adventures before arriving in Washington are nothing short of miraculous, surviving shipwrecks and other disasters. Work on the casting of the statue began as the United States lurched unevenly toward civil war. Halted in 1861 as war erupted, the casting was completed by late 1862. Work on the Capitol Dome was finished enough to allow its erection on top of the dome to be symbolically completed at precisely 12 noon on December 2nd, 1863.

A quick glance at the astrology of that moment in time explains why it was so carefully chosen and orchestrated. At that moment, a grand square is formed of the Moon, the North and South Moon nodes and the ascendant, all falling on the proper kerubic signs to form the cube of space of the galactic alignment, the cusps of Aquarius/Pisces, Leo/Virgo, Sagittarius/ Scorpio, and Gemini/Taurus, and highlighting, with the head and tail of the dragon, the Moon nodes, the dragon axis of the galaxy. Overlaid on this is a grand trine of Venus, Uranus and the ascendant.

This strange arrow shaped telelscoping of seven points into six is echoed in the odd shape of the neo-Roman headdress on the statue, and at noon on December 2nd 1862, as the head was being bolted in place facing east toward the ascendant horizon, this shape was mirrored in the stars. To the east lay the rising cusp of Aquarius/Pisces, symbol of the new age, the new aeon. Above, at its zenith, was the Sun, conjunct with Mercury, combining power with wisdom. Behind to the west was the waning Moon, just on the horizon at the cusp of Leo/Virgo. And just in case we didn’t completely understand the metaphor, the rising horizon of the new age, the ascendant, is tied in to the trine of Venus and Uranus, saying that this moment is the dawn of the goddess, Venus, of the new age, Uranus, discovered in 1782 just as the Revolution in America was won.

This synchronicity could hardly have been an accident, yet who could have planned it, and who chose the exact time, is lost in the bureaucratic mists of time. Keep it in mind though, because it is a strangely synchronous symbolic code for the moment in time when Columbia would begin to awaken… and perhaps a clue to the moment of her sacrificial destruction.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Columbia became more of an icon than an archetype; her form graced everything from political cartoons to flatware. As late as the 1940s, Columbia was still a viable symbol of America, used on coins and in official art. In the post-war world however, it was Columbia’s eagle that faced down the Communist bear and won both the space race (”The Eagle has landed‚Ķ”) and the Cold War, while Columbia herself became ever more remote and removed from the world.

This was symbolized in 1981 when the first of the new fleet of reusable space shuttles was christened “Columbia.” The goddess of Freedom, “triumphant in peace and war,” became the new symbol of our military and commercial exploitation of space. The Newer World was out there, in space, just waiting for a new generation of conquistadors to discover it. Columbia, as a symbol, had come full circle.

The space shuttle Columbia performed flawlessly, flying the first five missions and alternating thereafter with the newer craft as they came on line. She was on her 28th flight when she exploded, completing as it were a moon cycle of missions, remaining a goddess to the very end.

But, a few months before her fiery end over Texas, the goddess had begun to awaken, at least on an astral level…

Over the fall equinox of 2002, Fulcanelli’s mid point of the season of the catastrophe and Nostradamus’ turning of the great motor of the centuries, a mystic by the name of Steve Prellwitz had an encounter with the newly awakened goddess Columbia. Mr. Prellwitz, whose work can only be found in the most obscure lacunae of the Internet, is completely sincere and apparently honest in his reporting of his experiences.

Here’s his encounter with the goddess:

“Who is She?” I spoke out loud to my other self.

COLUMBIA, came the reply.

This suddenly made complete sense to me, as I remembered that the city of Washington DC was in fact constructed as an energy grid designed to give birth to the sleeping Goddess, Columbia, who was to be the new consciousness of the Earth itself.

“So that was the whole point of the Djed Ceremony?” I asked. “To awaken Columbia?” [The Djed Ceremony was the Equinox Event, see http://vincentbridges.com/RaisingtheDjed.htm)

YES. IT IS OUR DESTINY TO DO SO.

I came to the bottom of the steps and found myself in a large circular chamber. The floor was a huge map of the stars, laid out to express the galactic center alignment now occurring. The light within the torch was now blazing like a star, and the third frequency of my perceptions was filling almost all of my mind’s eye.

THE VIRGO CLUSTER, my voice within the light said. STAND OVER IT.
Even though I was not exactly clear on where that would be, the torch seemed to be pulling me to the right spot.

INVOKE THE GODDESS.

Again I was fed the strange words of an unknown tongue. As I spoke them the figure of a beautiful naked woman appeared on the floor next to me. She had long blonde hair, which seemed to glow of if it were really made of light.
CALL HER NAME.

“Columbia!” I said forcefully. As I spoke, that weird third level of my awareness ceased, faded away, and she opened her magnificent blue eyes.

The Goddess rose and stretched, Her bare breasts a sight of perfect beauty too wonderful to describe. Light glowed from Her head, Her pubic region and under Her arms, casting Her form in a soothing aura. As I stood there in awe, She smiled.

“America,” She said in soft, musical voice. Then She came to me and grasped the torch. Her hands closed over my own and we shared a moment of silent communion. Inside the light, my second self seemed more real to me. I was more looking at Steve than looking AS Steve.

Columbia took the torch from me. I made no effort to resist. In the light, the other me knew that it was the right thing to do.

She held it in Her right hand, raising it above Her head. As She did this, a book appeared in her other hand. It was silver and had the year 2002 written on its cover in gold.

“Liberty and light to all,” She said.

Then I heard a tortured, frantic scream from above. Adam Weishaupt fell from the darkness and landed in a confused heap next to us. He writhed on the floor, hissing and spitting, as he metamorphosed into his evil reptilian form, which resembled a velociraptor.

Columbia looked down, as the light from Her torch flowed out and then engulfed him. As She continued to smile the light increased, causing the raptor-thing to squirm even more, fighting for his life against the powers of the awakened Goddess. Then there was a startling explosion as the reptilian creature split from its human host. The soul of President Weishaupt, looking again like his normal form, was separated from the raptor, which melted into a heap of goo.

“Free at last!” he screamed with joy, and turned to Columbia, kneeling at her feet.

“Liberty and light to all,” She repeated.

As the goddess noted to Steve, the fall equinox of 2002, with its galactic cube alignments, acted as the trigger to release the sleeping or imprisoned goddess. Remember, the moment of her binding to the US Capitol dome marked a lunar arrangement of the cube of space, over laid by a Venus/Uranus trine with the ascendant. The fall equinox marked a solar alignment of the cube, thus signalling a transition from passive binding to active engagement. The key feature, astrologically, of the fall equinox was the double grand trine in Air and Fire forming a near perfect hexagram. Between two points of the hexagram, Venus formed a square aspect with Neptune and Jupiter, key planets in the double trine. This reproduces the arrangement at Columbia’s installation, except instead of the ascendant as the central point, signifying a focus on the future, the focus here is on Venus, the goddess herself, signalling an awakening or animation of the archetype.

The ascendant on the fall equinox of 2002 was also important to the Columbia arrangement. The alignment of Moon nodes, head and tail of the dragon, on the ascendant also falls along the galactic axis, but on the fall equinox, the alignments are reversed in both orientation and alignment ‚Äì that is upside down and backwards as if viewed through a refracting globe - from the moment of Columbia’s installation. We can think of this as turning a key in a lock, or reversing the polarity of the flow. The astrology, even in this simplistic way, clearly shows that the moment of the archetype’s activation, its release from bondage, was keyed to a reversal of the energetic pattern of its binding.

But there was a disquieting note. On the fall equinox, Pluto was conjunct the south Moon node in almost the same position the Sun/Mercury conjunction occupied in the installation chart. This sounds a cautionary note; the next Venus/Pluto conjunction on the natal Sun could be very bad for the newly emerging goddess… Such a conjunction occurred on January 23, 2003, one week after the shuttle was launched.
The astrology of the moment the space shuttle Columbia reached orbit, calculated as midnight, January 17th, GMT, also eerily echoed the moment of the monument’s installation. A grand trine of the ascendant, Uranus and Saturn formed, overlaid by the grand square of Sun, Moon, the asteroid Lillith and the ascendant. The major shift from the moment of installation falls in the grand trine. Uranus and Venus trine symbolized the goddess in service to the new age, “novus ordo seclorum,” but Uranus and Saturn trine can be seen as a warning that the karma of the New World Order is about to come due.

And so it does. The astrology for the moment of the space shuttle Columbia’s fiery end shows the signs of disaster when related to the moment of Columbia’s installation. First Mars in fiery Sagittarius falls on the installation’s natal conjunction of Sun, Mid-Heaven and Mercury, directly pointing to a disaster for the symbolic reality of Columbia. From the original grand trine, Venus and Saturn have traded places with Uranus, indicating a sacrificial quickening of karma involving the goddess. And most unsettling of all, Venus had almost passed the conjunction with Pluto, which occurred on the 23rd of January and was linked to Pluto only by their mutual conjunction to the Mid-Heaven. We can perhaps think of this last connection as putting a stop or an end to the transit itself; and also bringing the end of the shuttle Columbia, and perhaps, the archetype from which it was drawn.

Since the instant of the disaster also sported a conjunction of Sun, Moon and Neptune, we can see how it had such a deep and universal impact. Our conscious and unconscious minds are both engaged, and joined at that instant to the mass consciousness of the planet. The destruction of the space shuttle Columbia could not fail to have vast and long reaching consequences on the psyche of humanity. It was foreshadowed in its stars.

By Vincent Bridges (02/20/03)

Part One - Signs and portents in the sky

I am a child of the space age, starry eyed and wonder fuelled on all the science fiction archetypes a 1950s childhood could produce. To me, it was always obvious that we were living in mythological times.

On Saturday morning, February 1st, 2003, at just after 9 AM eastern time, our space age aspirations created a mythic event with cosmic ramifications, visible in the skies as a comet-like arrow of fire exploding and dissolving into a rain of death. Our collective unconscious, numbed by the impending rush to what could be an apocalyptic conflict in the Middle East, has yet to absorb the implications of what we all witnessed via television. The mythic symbolism is so powerful we feel an innate taboo against talking about it directly. And so it seeps deeper and deeper into the unconsciousness of us all.

By Monday, some folks out there, from very different perspectives, were beginning to suspect that there was indeed a mythic level to the space shuttle disaster:
“It is time for the American people to begin meditating about what USA policies in the Middle East are doing to the Palestinian people and about what George Bush is about to do to Iraqi civilians. There is a God! Many call him Dios and others call him Allah. Dios, Allah and God is the one supreme universal being, Creator of the entire universe. He does from time to time intervene in our affairs. He works in mysterious ways but always He gives signs.

“The brilliant Jewish (sic) “explorer of inner space” Carl Jung wrote of synchronicities in the lives of human beings and of the “collective unconscious”. Synchronicities, according to Jung, are those pesky little “meaningful coincidences” that often occur during times of crisis. Perhaps the “meaningful coincidence” involving the Jewish astronaut and Palestine, Texas is a way of God talking to us.” (Ernesto Cienfuegos - La Voz de Aztlan, 2/3/03)

And later that day, John Hogue, one of the world’s foremost Nostradamus scholars, chimed in with this:

“It is my belief that last Saturday’s space shuttle disaster (1 February.) is the first illumination of a succession of events coming in the next few months concerning Century 2 Quatrain 62.”
(…)
“Nestled in the grass in a field in eastern Texas, lies a mission patch from the fallen space shuttle Columbia. It somehow had miraculously survived its fiery fall out of the morning sky. The names of the seven heroic astronauts who died make an outline of their space shuttle. A glowing trail like a comet’s tale streaks through the shuttle’s outline ending in a many-pointed star. It is a star very similar to that filmed by a hundred amateur video cameras across Texas as it fell to earth like a flaming comet. Mabus will soon die, then will come, A horrible undoing of people and animals… when the comet will pass.

“Has the comet just passed?

“Is this the chilling portent of things to come for America if they should hurry off to war?

“Destiny holds it breath as America primes its war machine.”

(John Hogue, email from Hogue Prophecy Bulletin, 2/3/03)

Interesting isn’t it, that such different perspectives and ways of organizing the synchronistic component of the archetypal event could arrive at basically the same conclusion? It is a bad omen, an ill augury, for America and its on-rushing charge to war.

Last fall, just after the equinox, I wrote an article entitled “After Judgment Day.” I planned to post it on the follow up page to the Djed Raising event, but kept hesitating. Now, I think I know why‚Ķ

Here’s the relevant section:

In the spring of 1999, soon after I returned from a research trip in France, I followed and matched events in the Balkans to Nostradamus’ quatrains and thereby had a revelation. The quatrains were not designed to predict events, but to point to places and events where the larger forces that drive history took one path rather than another. Which path was which could be determined by studying the events in terms of the prophetic pattern of possible futures laid out by Nostradamus.

Nostradamus then was giving us a blueprint to the convergence points of possible histories. By being aware of which events described in the quatrains actually occurred, it should be possible to determine which stream of the future we were heading down. The Balkan conflict was a key switch point, and as the events played out, we could see the range of possible future actions taking shape around us. Nostradamus’ “fantasy “of a possible world conflict erupting from the Middle East was rapidly becoming more and more a reality.

It was also not lost on me that the only two numerical dates given by Nostradamus, 1792 and 1999, were significant in the pattern we had uncovered. The first date, 1792, is very close, just slightly more than 1/36th of a degree, to the point where the galactic meridian and the zenith/nadir of the sky at the latitude of Cairo began to align. This would be easily discernable with a good armillary sphere and so within the reach of Nostradamus or any other astronomer. The second, 1999, no matter how we count it, falls within the critical period described by Fulcanelli as the season of the catastrophe. If we consider that the MABUS archetype, Nostradamus’ Third Anti-Christ, is a contraction of the names of the three principle players, OsaMA, SaddAM and BUSh, then the events of 9/11/2001 and afterward indicate that the future is collapsing into the very dire pattern glimpsed by Nostradamus.

Adding to this is the fact of America’s emergence as a new imperial power on a level that goes far beyond anything ever seen before. By considering a pre-emptive strike on a sovereign nation because it might, at some future point threaten the country’s security, America reveals itself as just another power hungry Empire as morally bankrupt as it is politically corrupted. And this action of course appears destined to bring on the global conflict with Islam foreseen by Nostradamus. Some of the worst-case scenarios for our unilateral action against Iraq read much like the worst future described by Nostradamus’ quatrains. Is this accident, synchronicity, or what?

Nostradamus however does give us a few clues, signposts to watch out for as the momentum for war builds. In Century II, Quatrain 62, the quatrain where Nostradamus dubs the Third Anti-Christ Mabus, we are given a sequence. First a “comet” then the death of Mabus triggers a grisly vengeance. This suggests Century VIII, Quatrain 77, where the death of the Third Anti-Christ either ends or provokes a 27 year long Armageddon.

MABUS, our unholy trinity of protagonists, appears to be intrinsically linked. The death of any one of them, or at least the sudden death of either Bush or Saddam, might just provoke a vengeful cataclysmic confrontation that would end in the very worst of all Nostradamus’ possible futures. The “comet” could be the leading edge of the galactic superwave, or it could be a missile attack on Bagdad or Jerusalem, or perhaps, even Washington‚Ķ

But this is not the only quatrain about a “comet.” One of the most interesting such quatrains, and one that perhaps dates the comet referred to in II/62, is Century II, Quatrain 46 (46-62 inclusive = 17). It speaks directly of renewing the “great motor” of the centuries, a reference to the equinox and the galactic alignment, and says that after a cycle of great misery, an even greater one approaches. Blood, iron and milky-looking toxic materials will rain down as a fire is seen streaking across the sky with a blazing trail of sparks. This clearly suggests a rocket, and even the number of the quatrain, 46, points to 1946, the year America appropriated Von Braun and the German V-2 program, the precursor of both the ICBM and the Atlas V.

Therefore, Nostradamus is presenting a schema or template for the immediate future. A sign or portent in the sky will signal the beginning of the Final Crusade, our ill-conceived aggressive war on Iraq and its consequences. Perhaps it will be the close approach of a comet, or even more likely it will be a missile strike launched by one side or the other that leads to the death of Mabus and the resulting terrible consequences. Quatrain II/46 suggests that it will happen soon, perhaps, given the necessities of war in the region, in January or February… (written 10/12/2002)

If, as John Hogue speculates, the space shuttle disaster was the “comet,” which seems likely given II/46, then sometimes in the next hundred days or so (02/01/03 to 05/10/030); we can expect that one of the three Mabuses will die, and that the resulting vengeance will touch off the catastrophe of the Final Crusade, Armageddon itself. A chilling thought to be sure‚Ķ

However, the symbolic harbinger of that approaching disaster is in its way a message. The space shuttle disaster happened for reasons that we may never fully understand, but the event itself crystallized a pattern of synchronistic occurrences, facts, numbers, connections and connotations, that gave it a mythic proportion in and of itself. Nostradamus used, in his cryptic way, this mythic dimension to mark an unmistakable turning point in human existence. As we live through it, we could not help but be aware of the meaning of the “comet.” This, Nostradamus considered, could only help us understand, and perhaps avoid, the cataclysm so quickly approaching on its heels.

The hidden 17 connecting the two quatrains in Century II demonstrates that Nostradamus had an eerie degree of insight, or a powerful sense of synchronicity. By following this strange numerical clue, and others like it, we can unravel the mythic meanings behind the space shuttle Columbia’s explosive end between Palestine and Tyler, Texas. And by doing so we find echoes and symbolic reflections of all the forces at work in the approaching Armageddon.